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The development of Overwatch 2 was troublesome, to say the least. Some PvE elements wound up being scrapped, and there were tensions over the release schedule. Jeff Kaplan, a former director on Overwatch, considers the whole ordeal one of his greatest failings in the industry.
"It's one of my biggest mistakes I've made as a creative leader in my career," he says on the Lex Fridman podcast. "There were two points of failure for me. The first was, I had people on the game team who didn't like PvP or competitive shooters, and they really loved the Overwatch universe and wanted to play these characters and heroes, they wanted to do it on their own terms in a PvE setting."
Though they were enthusiastic, they wanted the emphasis to be on a more co-operative, campaign-driven experience, rather than PvP, despite the first Overwatch being a "runaway success." The second, he states, was from management.
"The Blizzard, and more so the Activision management teams started really putting the heat on, 'You said Overwatch 2 was going to be out in 2019,'" he remembers, as they pointed towards slides he presented featuring a hypothetical timeline for the hero shooter. "You never want to put a PowerPoint deck in front of a corporate executive, you might as well etch it in stone and come down from the mountain."
The slide shown has a second game arriving around 2019, "all bullshit," as Kaplan calls it. A means of communicating a vision, not a hard plan, but execs apparently saw it differently. The pressure was compounded by ideas being thrown around on Overwatch 2 in 2015, prior to the original, by Kaplan, Chris Metzen, former creative director on Overwatch, and Michael Chu, the former lead writer on Overwatch.
It was all so early, because he was trying to create a runway for Overwatch as a multi-faceted property. Sadly, things didn't turn out that way, and Overwatch 2 launched in 2023, still focused on PvP, and has since been rebranded to simply Overwatch. Kaplan left Blizzard in 2021.
